AI takes away the rehearsal years

Aug 20

The junior work is the first to go. The first draft. The notes from a meeting nobody read. The numbers someone used to check by hand.

A new report from the World Economic Forum and PwC puts a number on it. More than one in three young workers are in jobs where AI now does part of the work.

Nobody misses that work. It was slow and a lot of it wasn't very good. Ask any senior whether they miss checking a spreadsheet at eleven at night. But the output was never the point. Doing that work is how a person learns the job. No job description ever said so.

The archivist and the empty drawer

Your brain has an archivist. I usually call him Hippo. He runs the hippocampus, a small seahorse shaped part on each side of your brain. His job is to store what happens to you and file it where you can find it again.

Hippo is methodical and a little fussy. He likes order. Storage is not his real skill though. Connection is. He puts one experience next to another until you have a picture of how things work.

That picture is what we call judgment.

And Hippo cannot file an experience you never had. He needs the deadline that slipped. The client who went quiet. The moment you were wrong in front of six people and had to keep talking anyway.

Those are not war stories. They are files. Each one gets pulled later, in a meeting, without you noticing.

The junior tasks were how the files got made. Low stakes, someone watching, a small cost when it went wrong.

The promotion that arrives too early

In my book I write about resources. Most leaders count three of them. Time, money and people. There is a fourth one. How much experience a person can actually reach for when the moment comes.

The first three are looked at in every plan. The fourth one never is. And it is the one that decides whether someone can handle pressure.

Corty, the decision maker behind your forehead, does not solve a problem from nothing. She asks Hippo what we have seen before. Hippo hands over the nearest files. Then she chooses.

Now give that junior person eight years and a title. The reps never happened. The drawer is thin.

A leader with a thin archive is not less clever. She simply has less to pull from. So she takes longer. She checks more. She asks you what you would do. Then she asks again a week later.

In a talent review that gets written down as low capability. It isn't. There is simply no file in the drawer.

Nothing looks wrong this quarter. The work still gets done, on time, to a decent standard. It goes wrong in five years. That is when she is the one who has to make the call. And there is nothing behind her to make it with.

Put the reps back on purpose

Two things here. Both are small.

First, stop handing over the finished version. When you give a junior person the AI draft to polish, you have taken the rep away. Give them the brief instead. Ask for their own answer before they open the tool. A rough outline is enough. Three bullet points and a recommendation they are willing to defend. Then put it next to what the machine produced. Spend ten minutes on where the two differ and why. Those ten minutes are the file being made.

Second, bring someone junior to the meeting that might go badly. Not the polished update. The one where the client is unhappy and you have no good answer yet. Let them watch you handle it. Hippo files other people's experience too, as long as the person was actually there.

Neither one needs a programme or a budget. Both take a little longer than letting the tool do it. But it is time well spend for the future.

You cannot buy an archive back later. There is no course that puts the missing years into the drawer.

I keep thinking about the second year analyst who has never had to guess at anything. She will be a manager in four years. One day nobody around her will know the answer.

What will she reach for then?

/ Maria